This weekend was the Africa All Mode International DX Contest. I’m not a contest station but I like to use contests to try things out, in this case it was not successful! Looking at the HF predictions propagation down to Africa from the UK was looking a little tricky but the late afternoon looked like a good chance on the 10 and 20m bands. With that in mind I constructed a 10m band dipole antenna at 5.5 elevation and a 20m band droopy dipole both aimed in the right direction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Roll on late afternoon and armed with the log book, some beers to keep things rolling and my portable 100w setup I was ready to go… however the bands were dead. Some QSOs into Spain, Serbia and Russia proved the setup was working but no stations were heard from Africa. It seems I wasn’t the only one… VE9CF’s reflections on the SARL All Mode DX Contest.<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n Never mind, hopefully next time will see better participation, it was still a worthwhile experience to set up and test some of my equipment – lesson learnt; my dipole antennas need stronger fixings at the end of the elements. Two came loose in testing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This weekend was the Africa All Mode International DX Contest. I’m not a contest station but I like to use contests to try things out, in this case it was not successful! Looking at the HF predictions propagation down to Africa from the UK was looking a little tricky but the late afternoon looked like […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/willwoodman.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/willwoodman.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/willwoodman.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/willwoodman.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/willwoodman.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/willwoodman.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":68,"href":"https:\/\/willwoodman.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67\/revisions\/68"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/willwoodman.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/willwoodman.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/willwoodman.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}